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Congestive Heart Failure (CHF)

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Heart insufficiency as a disease of old age constitutes a serious clinical picture as its complications often result in death. Cardiogenic pulmonary edema, as a consequence of heart insufficiency, as well as non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema, are diseases indicating immediate measures as they are accompanied by rapid respiratory insufficiency. This article will provide you with everything you need to know about the epidemiology, etiology, classifications, diagnostics and therapy for cardiac insufficiency and pulmonary edema.

We will take a look at the myocardium. With the myocardium, it is the fact that we are working with the middle part of the heart. If it is endocardium, then you are thinking more along the lines of valvular heart disease perhaps. It is exactly what you are doing. So let's take a look at the myocardium and the categories of pathologies that come under or affect the myocardium. We will take a look at CHF, congestive heart failure. You know this as being end-stage heart disease. So, anything that causes damage to the myocardium from dilated cardiomyopathy to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy to restrictive cardiomyopathy and so forth, eventually if there is enough death that is taking place in the myocardium, are you not going to result in CHF? The most common cause of CHF is going to be ischemic. So, if your patient has something like an ST elevation in leads V1, V2, and V3, and then you know there is a transmural myocardial infarction affecting which coronary artery? The left anterior descending and at some point later on down the road, your patient may develop congestive heart failure. You see my point. So ischemia would be a very common cause or actually it is the most common cause of CHF. CHF final and common pathway of myocardial disease. Now the way that we will approach this is dilated cardiomyopathy and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy would be relatively common at least in developed countries. Is that clear? You want to think that a dilated cardiomyopathy as being end-stage heart disease just like you have cirrhosis being end-stage liver disease. Listen to what I am saying. I am drawing a lot of parallels here and I will keep doing this for you so that you don't waste as much time memorizing details...